Currently, using computers to perform online searching is very popular. This has been, for many years, a pervasive mechanism by which people obtain information, and a great deal of technology, innovation and financial resources, have been expended in this area. To a large extent, searching has become an integral part of people's online behavior.
However, the user experience when attempting to perform online searching is still, in many ways, unsatisfactory. The way people typically search for information online today is that they first open an interface to a search engine and then submit an initial query to that search engine. The search engine searches web content and returns a list of search results, which are usually linked to web pages that the search engine has calculated to be relevant to the user's query. The user then normally engages in a tedious recursive process by which the user repeatedly navigates from a link on the search results page returned by the search engine to the site identified by the link, browses that site (or web page) and returns to the search engine in order to click on another link to navigate to another web page.
Typically, a user may be performing a task, such as writing a document, performing research, etc. and, in the middle of that task need to perform the searching operation in order to obtain additional information. Therefore, the tedious recursive navigation required by the user in a conventional search system takes the user away from the task at hand.
Some types of automatically focused searching techniques have also been used. For instance, when the user is reviewing a web page, the web page may have an embedded search box that allows the user to enter one or more search terms to perform additional searching. However, the search box on such a web page normally allows the user two options. The first option is that the user can perform a web search, which is a general search of web content. The second option is that the user can search content on the site that contains the page which the user is currently reviewing. These options are both extremes. The web search is simply a gateway to a general purpose search that searches web content, while the site search only allows a user to search the content of a single, individual, web site.
The discussion above is merely provided for general background information and is not intended to be used as an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter.